Abstract
There is a growing interest in building Internetscale
sensor networks that integrate sensors from around the
world into a single unified system. In contrast, robotics application
development has primarily focused on building specialized
systems. These specialized systems take scalability and reliability
into consideration, but generally neglect exploring the key
components required to build a large scale system. Integrating
robotic applications with Internet-scale sensor networks will
unify specialized robotics applications and provide answers
to large scale implementation concerns. We focus on utilizing
Internet-scale sensor network technology to construct a framework
for unifying robotic systems. Our framework web-enables
a surveillance robot’s sensor observations and provides a webinterface
to the robot’s actuators. This lets robots seamlessly
integrate into web applications. In addition, the framework
eliminates most prerequisite robotics knowledge, allowing for
the creation of general web-based robotics applications. The
framework also provides mechanisms to create applications
that can interface with any robot. Frameworks such as this
one are key to solving large scale mobile robotics implementation
problems. We provide an overview of previous Internetscale
sensor networks, Sensorpedia (an ad-hoc Internet-scale
sensor network), our framework for integrating robots with
Sensorpedia, two applications which illustrate our frameworks
ability to support general web-based robotic control, and offer
experimental results that illustrate our framework’s scalability,
feasibility, and resource requirements.